Leading invasion biologists sometimes dismiss critics and criticisms of their field by invoking “the straw man” fallacy. Critics of invasion biology are also labelled as a small group of “naysayers” or “contrarians”, who are sometimes engaging in “science denialism”. Such unfortunate labels can be seen as a way to possibly suppress legitimate debates and dismiss or minimize reasonable concerns about some aspects of invasion biology, including the uncertainties about the geographic origins and complex environmental impacts of species, and the control (...) programs against species perceived as “invasive”. In assessing the quality of the debate in this area, we examine the validity of the use of various strategies, including the “straw man” concept, and explore a range of potential logical fallacies present in some recent prominent discussions about invasion biology and so-called “invasive” species. The goal is to add some clarity to the concepts involved, point out some problematic issues, and improve the quality of the debates as the discussions move forward. (shrink)

The article presents the preliminary results of the author’s study of the unedited homily De transfiguratione et eleemosyna, ascribed to John Chrysostom. The question of the manuscript tradition is first discussed. The article shows that Maurice Sachot is right when he indicates only the manuscript Romanus Angelicus gr. 125 as a manuscript witness of this homily and that the other two witnesses indicated by Pinakes are erroneous. Then, the descriptions of the folios that preserve the homily are analysed in the (...) light of a new examination of them. This re-examination shows that hitherto several sources that inspired the compiler have gone unnoticed. This is followed by a brief summary of the contents of the homily and an analysis of the passages in which almsgiving is mentioned.Contribution: The article offers a re-examination of the folios 353v–361 from the manuscript Romanus Angelicus gr. 125, the first presentation of the content of the homily De transfiguratione et eleemosyna, and tries to shed light on the association of the theme of the Transfiguration with almsgiving. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, (...) are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the philosophical sources of some of the criticisms made in the second half of the 20th century to the practices and the main assumptions of historiography. In particular, the influence of the writings by Nietzsche dedicated to European Historicism on the renewed concept of history which is imposed in the twentieth century from the thought of Heidegger and Foucault. The divergent concepts of historical time and existential temporality, as well as those of (...) narrative unity and continuity of historical events, are the concepts that mainly fall under the critical scrutiny of these thinkers. Archaeological investigations that Foucault devotes to institutions and procedures of the European past are mentioned as examples of the critical review of traditional historiography. (shrink)

In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.

An important part of responsible business practices is compliance with the law. This article details what actually happens when the laws of the host country fail to ensure adequate protection. The focus here is on land dispossession and loss of livelihood in relation to a gold mine project in central Ghana. How is it that a well‐known international company—Newmont—with its own corporate social responsibility (CSR) statements sets up a project in the year 2003 that displaces subsistence farmers from their land (...) without compensating in cash or with replacement land? The analysis identifies the factors that lead the company to not compensate farmers for their lost land: cost‐cutting, strict adherence to the law, CSR commitment that was new and not internalized, complexities of the Ghanaian land tenure system, peer pressure to preserve the status quo, selection of an “old‐school” CSR manager, and the inadequacy of Ghanaian mining law to account for relatively novel, “open‐pit” mining techniques. However, the specter of famine raised by civil society activism, the involvement of the International Financial Corporation, and a better qualified CSR team constitute another set of factors that lead to a comprehensive package of livelihood improvement measures. There is a contrast between the complexity, long‐term, and advanced type of assistance Newmont currently envisages and the backward, short‐term, formalism, and brutality of denying compensation for land back in 2003. This research is based on the extensive documentation Newmont makes available on its web site, interviews conducted in Ghana, and literature research. (shrink)

"In 2022, two cans of tomato soup were thrown over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London by two climate activists. The aim of this paper is not to explain the motives behind the protest in terms of environmental activism, but to address the implications of this phenomenon for the status of artistic images in our time. The protest in question is one of the many symptoms of the fact that images associated with a pure state of gaze (...) have become morally dubious due to a certain moralistic turn in contemporary discourses on art. Consequently, what seems to be lost in today’s movements of moralizing aesthetics, whether in art or in environmental activism, is not only the “aura” of an artwork, but also the idea that the contemplation of beauty in and for itself would provide a foundation for humans’ moral vocation. In a gaseous state of art (Y. Michaud) in which the transient effects of things are more important than their essence, the moralistic tendencies combined with the lack of moral foundations can no longer conceive of the ethical effects of images without explicit moral content, thus calling for a new form of heteronomy in art. Keywords: Kantian aesthetics, ethics, contemplation, natural beauty, autonomy of art, environmental activism. ". (shrink)

Some of the topics presented in this volume of original essays on contemporary approaches to belief include the problem of misrepresentation and false belief, conscious versus unconscious belief, explicit versus tacit belief, and the durable versus ephemeral question of the nature of belief. The contributors, Fred Dretske, Keith Lehrer, William Lycan, Stephen Schiffer, Stephen P. Stich, and the editor, Radu Bogdan, focus on the mental realization of belief, its cognitive and behavioral aspects, and the semantic aspects of its content. (...) This interdisciplinary study takes advantage of many new theories in what has become an important area of research. (shrink)

Through the efforts of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT), a list of manuscripts is available that preserves homilies on the healing of the paralytic. Included in this list is the codex Athonensis, Lauras A 112 (Eustratiadis 112), which, according to those who provided its second description, preserves in the last four folios ‘a homily on the paralytic by John Chrysostom’. After a brief presentation of what is known about this codex, this article offers a detailed examination (...) of the codex’s last four folios, revealing that the description of them by Spyridon Lauriotis and Sophronios Eustratiadis is inaccurate. Contribution: This article provides the first thorough examination of the last four folios of the codex Athonensis, Lauras A 112 (Eustratiadis 112), demonstrating that they do not contain ‘a homily on the paralytic by John Chrysostom’ but rather several fragments of homilies on Thomas, Mid-Pentecost and the Ascension. Thus, the article contributes to the description of the codex and to the identification of a previously unknown manuscript witness to several homilies. (shrink)

In his inventory of the manuscript tradition of the homilies on the Transfiguration, Maurice Sachot stated that folios 46r-55r of the codex Parisinus graecus 1611 contain the homily In transfigurationem Domini (BHGn 1980a). He also stated that this text is unedited and that it is most probably a recension of the homily In transfigurationem Domini (CPG 5807; BHG 1980) attributed to Proclus of Constantinople. To date, however, this homily has remained unpublished and unstudied. After a brief presentation of the codex (...) Parisinus graecus 1611, this article brings to light a surprise that emerges from examining folios 46r-55r of the Parisian manuscript. CONTRIBUTION: The article proves that the homily In transfigurationem Domini (BHGn 1980a) is not a recension of the homily on the Transfiguration (CPG 5807; BHG 1980), but a compilation for which the beginning of the homily on the Transfiguration attributed to Proclus of Constantinople was used. (shrink)

Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative aesthetics are not mere occurrences of disgust or repulsiveness in art and in everyday life, but ways of addressing the repulsive in (...) relation to the culturally variable scope of art and aesthetics. Besides the classical paradigm that associates repugnant subjects with their pleasure-inducing imitations in art, and the transgressions of modern and contemporary art that increasingly shocked their audience, revulsion can also be regarded as a form of displeasure linked to the quotidian, yet aesthetically relevant forms of life. By virtue of this ordinary nature, which is not unfamiliar to other (non-Western) cultures, revulsion could be placed at the core of everyday aesthetics, since it confirms both the transition from contemplation to action in recent aesthetics, that is, the practical preoccupation with the aesthetic quality of living, and the broader redefinition of aesthetics in terms of sensory reactions. (shrink)

abstract G. A. Cohen argues that egalitarians should compensate for expensive tastes or for the fact that they are expensive. Ronald Dworkin, by contrast, regards most expensive tastes as unworthy of compensation — only if a person disidentifies with his own such tastes (i.e. wishes he did not have them) is compensation appropriate. Dworkinians appeal, inter alia, to the so‐called ‘first‐person’ or ‘continuity’ test. According to the continuity test, an appropriate standard of interpersonal comparison reflects people's own assessment of their (...) relative standing: Person A can only legitimately demand compensation from person B if he regards himself as worse off, all things considered, than B. The typical bearer of expensive tastes does not regard herself as being worse off than others with less expensive tastes. Hence, in the typical case, pace Cohen, compensation for expensive tastes is inappropriate. The article scrutinizes this rationale for not compensating for expensive tastes. Especially, we try to bolster the continuity test by relating it to Dworkin's distinction between integrated and detached values, pointing out that an argument for the continuity test can be built on the assumption that equality has integrated value. In brief, the point is that a metric of equality should be assessed, partly, in virtue of its consequences for related ideals. One of these is the kind of justificatory community promoted by the continuity test. We defend this view against an objection to the effect that equality is a detached value. We conclude that the continuity test constitutes a strong foothold for the resourcist egalitarian reluctance to compensate people for their expensive tastes. (shrink)

In this book, Radu Bogdan proposes that humans think reflexively because they interpret each other's minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, ...

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)

Cyber risk has become one of the greatest threats to firms in recent years. Accordingly, boards of directors must be continually vigilant about this danger. They have a duty to ensure that the companies adopt appropriate cybersecurity measures to manage the risk of cyber fraud. Boards should also ensure that the firm disclose material cyber risk and breaches. We examine how the board’s gender composition can influence the extent of such disclosure, based on a sample of the companies listed on (...) the S&P/TSX 60 Index over the period 2014–2018. Results show evidence of a positive association between the presence and level of cybersecurity disclosure and board gender diversity. However, the board must boast a critical mass of at least three women before this positive impact can be observed. Our findings contribute to the debate on the importance of gender diversity by adding the concept of the positive influence of heterogeneity on cyber disclosure. We also augment the literature on the critical mass of women in boardrooms by providing empirical evidence that three or more women constitute the threshold for better governance. Our study has important implications for investors, stakeholders and regulators. If investors wish to increase cybersecurity disclosure, they should ask for more diversified boards. Our findings support regulators in their efforts to increase women’s representation on boards by providing empirical evidence of better outcomes with this type of board composition. (shrink)

In order to redefine barbarism, a hermeneutical framework is needed. The contemporary socio-cultural context and the transformations that have occurred during the last decades represent the premises for a new barbarism. In redefining barbarism, its relationship with civilization and culture should be first considered. Cultural mutations, together with the historical and political phenomena involved in contemporary civilizations’ reorganization as set forth in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel P. Huntington), offer the theoretical background for the (...) discourse wherein barbarism could revive and take an appearance other than the common one. The necessity of reinterpreting barbarism is backed up by other variables such as its structural inconsistency and weakness, which most definitely diminish its impact on individuals. Following the 20th century philosophical tendency of harshly critical thinking, all these point to the current weak character of barbarism. Thus so-called “weak barbarism” is reinterpreted evolutionally for a better reception among contemporary cultural philosophy, axiological and ethical studies. (shrink)

Nietzsche no perdió la ocasión de menospreciar a Mill como el típico inglés de mentalidad pasiva, en cambio los intérpretes actuales de Nietzsche son cautelosos en este aspecto, pues el filósofo alemán leyó muy minuciosamente a Mill, en particular su obra Sobre la libertad. Cuando él propicia que Zaratustra hable acerca de «el más frío de todos los monstruos fríos», lo hace con una promesa de futuro: «Allí, donde el Estado acaba, ahí comienza el ser humano que no es superfluo (...) […]. Allí, donde el Estado acaba, — ¡miradme de este modo hacia allá hermanos míos! ¿No los veis, al arcoíris y los puentes del suprahumano?». El presente trabajo establece una comparativa entre la visión de Dios y del Estado en la época moderna y la reflexión que hace Friedrich Nietzsche en Así habló Zaratustra acerca del Estado como algo monstruoso. Para este propósito se utilizarán respectivamente pasajes de la obra de Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schonpenhauer, Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, Karl Marx, Max Sterner, Wilhelm von Humboldt y John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Cet article offre une vue d’ensemble sur les Éléments pour la généalogie de la morale de Nietzsche. La genèse de l’œuvre est d’abord présentée, puis les sources que Nietzsche a exploitées pour ses réflexions sont examinées. Cet examen des sources est suivi d’une analyse de la conception, de la structure et du contenu de l’« écrit polémique » de Nietzsche. Les sections du livre sont présentées et commentées dans leur succession.

This study is considered as a proposal to identify some metaphysical support of the self-care for a patient suffering from a chronic disease, as an extension of the bio-psycho-social paradigm. The methodology is dominated by a phenomenological perspective, supported by a hermeneutic conceptual analysis of the care of the self in Michel Foucault, focused on the Socratico-Platonic period and pervaded by the intention of having a translation and application to self-care. Foucault pleads for an aesthetics of the self, called subjectivity, (...) in which the subject is self-constituted through the so-called technologies of the self. The care of the self comes from the resignification of the philosophy as a way of life in which the subject is objectified. The translation and the applicability of the care of the self at the idea level to self-care are identified precisely in the acquisition of some important principles of the philosophy of care of the self from the Greek Antiquity: the role of awakener of consciousness of the one who is concerned about oneself as the first moment of the metaphor of awakening from the sleep, the ēthos as a way of being, a way of behaving and a life model. The pair self-knowledge – care of oneself justifies informing the former by the latter, in which being concerned about oneself means knowing oneself. Nevertheless, knowledge means care of the self where the self is synonymous with the soul and moreover, with the divine element in man. (shrink)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, France was the main site of the controversy around the so-called eoliths, supposedly human-made tools of Tertiary Europe. In contrast to the more common situation where scientists have to make sure that an object stabilized in a laboratory is not an artifact of the lab but a natural object, in the eoliths debates the opposite was the case. The eolith proponents tried to render plausible the object's artificial, that is human, origin. In (...) their case, the objects would only be of scientific interest if they were artifacts not geofacts (naturally flaked stones). The paper ties in with existing literature on the French eoliths movement and investigates the successive eoliths debates in Britain. In Bruno Latour's terms, eoliths as archaeological evidence for Tertiary Man in Europe could gain in reality through a successful enlisting of the collaboration of human and non-human actors such as scientists, theories, publications, taxonomies, technologies, institutions, etc. Indeed, networks were established among scientists, preferably of powerful institutions, the 'tools' were integrated or denied a place in existing taxonomies of prehistoric artifacts, experiments were carried out to demonstrate their chance or designed origin, and their convergence or incompatibility with a certain theoretical framework was discussed. Arguments often revolved around questions of negative evidence, since both proponents and opponents of eoliths as tools were aware of the fact that the eoliths' strongest tie to reality would be evidence of the toolmakers themselves. Several known hominid fossils, among them those of doubtful age, were thus proposed as Tertiary shapers of the 'tools'. These hypothetical 'Englishmen' and their supposed artifacts were enmeshed in particular theories of human evolution, marked as they were by the racism and nationalism widespread at the time. (shrink)

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.

This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information.

Although the Internet is frequently referred to as a global public resource, its functioning remains predominantly controlled by private actors. The Internet brought about significant shifts in the way we conceptualize governance. In particular, the handling of “big data” by private intermediaries has a direct impact on routine practices and personal lives. The implementation of the “right to be forgotten” following the May 2014 decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union against Google blurs the boundaries between the (...) public and the private, and extends the responsibilities of the latter to court-style decision making. This article analyzes the regulatory developments in this area and the implications of outsourcing of important governance practices to private intermediaries. It looks at the decision-making process for the “right to be forgotten” to illustrate the extent to which the hybridization of such procedures results in new arrangements between public and private ordering in Internet governance. (shrink)

The local justification of beliefs and hypotheses has recently become a major concern for epistemologists and philosophers of induction. As such, the problem of local justification is not entirely new. Most pragmatists had addressed themselves to it, and so did, to some extent, many classical inductivists in the Bacon-Whewell-Mill tradition. In the last few decades, however, the use of logic and semantics, probability calculus, statistical methods, and decision-theoretic concepts in the reconstruction of in ductive inference has revealed some important technical (...) respects in which inductive justification can be local: the choice of a language, with its syntactic and semantic features, the relativity of probabilistic evalua tions to an initial body of evidence or background knowledge and to an agent's utilities and preferences, etc. Some paradoxes and difficulties encountered by purely formal accounts of inductive justification, the erosion of the once dominant empiricist position, which most approaches to induction took for granted, and the increasing challenge of noninduc tivist epistemolgies have underscored the need of accounting for the methodological problems of applying inductive logic to real life contexts, particularly in science. As a result, in the late fifties and sixties, several related developments pointed to a new, local approach to inductive justification. (shrink)

Can a minority agent, Jamal, discriminate against a majority agent, Dave, conceptually speaking? Taking an experimental-philosophical approach, this article addresses the conceptual puzzle by investigating both the ordinary usage of discrimination and whether the academic literature reflects the folk concept. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of discrimination as it is used across the discrimination research field. The analysis produces two novel definitions of discrimination: a symmetric conception, which implies multi-directionality, and an asymmetric conception, which implies uni-directionality. Then, I empirically (...) investigate the US lay concept of discrimination (N = 1,487). The highlight of the paper is an experiment on whether US ordinary usage is symmetric or asymmetric (Study 1), tested across four contexts and three traits (Hiring: Gender, Club: Sexuality, Dating: Race, Parental: Gender). In addition, I study which groups are most often discriminated against, according to respondents, to record potential sensitivity to the frequency of discrimination (Study 2). Overall, the results show that ordinary usage in the US is symmetric across different contexts and traits, and that paradigmatic minority groups are most often discriminated against. So, according to respondents, Jamal can discriminate against Dave, although Jamal is more often discriminated against than Dave. (shrink)

An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develop self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation.

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)